Gangsters and wheelchairs: urban teachers’ perceptions of disability,race and gender

This investigation provides inquiry into Disability Critical Race Studies to analyze the intersecting attributes related to race, gender and disability. The application of Disability Critical Race Studies revealed the ways in which race/ethnicity and gender merge to erroneously typecast African-American men who are wheelchair users as reformed ‘gang bangers’ or ‘victims’ of neighborhood gun violence. This investigation examines urban pre-service teachers’ understandings of disability and underscores the challenging intersection of race, gender and disability within urban communities.     

Constructing ‘disability’ in Myanmar: teachers,community stakeholders,and the complexity of disability models

This article explores Myanmar teachers’ and community stakeholders’ constructions of disability. We examine how various religious perspectives – particularly Buddhism – inform and shape understandings of impairment and how these beliefs intersect with a strongly medicalised construction of disability. However, in our discussion and exploration of the responses, we also found that the notion of two primary disability ‘models’ – namely the medical model and the social model – lack nuance, complexity, and socio-cultural consideration. Through examining teachers’ and community members’ perspectives of disability in Myanmar, we highlight the importance of socio-cultural variance in understanding local constructions of disability.     

The dairymaid and the prince: race,memory, and the story of Benjamin Banneker’s grandmother

The list of white Englishwomen, who formed intimate relationships with African men between 1680 and 1750 in Maryland, is impressive, more so because by 1664, Maryland laws made interracial marriages between white women and African men illegal. Court records exist documenting the punishment of women both for ‘fornicating’ with men of African descent and for having children by them, though how rigorously early colonial Maryland marriage laws were enforced remains unknown. What is known and what increasingly stringent marriage laws in Maryland suggest is that after 1664 white English women continued to choose black partners (both slave and free), regardless of serious social consequences that included social exclusion, lengthened indenture service, forced servitude of their children and of their sexual partners, and public physical punishment including whipping. By 1715, it became illegal in Maryland for black women to engage in intimate relationships with men. Mixed-race women, commonly called ‘mulatto’ in early records, found themselves with few choices in their sexual partners, since legally they were not allowed to engage in intimate relationships with either white or black men. One of these women, Molly Welsh, serves as a reminder of the unusual and unique position for women during the seventeenth century as servants, slave owners, property owners, and as partners in interracial relationships.     

Trying to make race science the “civil” science: charisma in the race and intelligence debates

Theory and Society - When studying science contexts, scholars typically position charismatic authority as an adjunct or something that provides a meaning-laden boost to rational authority. In this...     

“Anchoring” white community: White women activists and the politics of public schools

This article discusses the political clout wielded by a group of white women who participate in “Presidents’ Committee,” an organization of Parents Association presidents in a New York City Community School District. The school district, like many urban areas, is experiencing an exodus of white families to the suburbs, which are seen as offering better resources and a safe social distance from blacks and other non‐whites. In this context of social change, white mothers who participate in Presidents’ Committee push at gender boundaries in the public sphere by professionalizing motherhood and watching over potentially corrupt political practices. At the same time, their activism can be understood as a key component of local efforts to reproduce “white” community. Through this ethnographic analysis, “whiteness” is unpacked as a construct that is fractured by gender, class, and place of origin, while remaining a resilient idealized resource with which to reproduce a black/white racial binary.     

Demanding an ‘adequate solution:’ the American Legion,the Immigration Act of 1924, and the politics of exclusion

This article analyses the American Legion’s role in developing a discourse of exclusion surrounding the Immigration Act of 1924. The Legion strategically used the political rhetoric of states’ rights and federalism in addition to racist and nativist language to emphasise the need for increased federal restrictions on immigration. The arguments found in the Legion’s resolutions, pamphlets and testimony to Congress place the organisation’s emphasis on the political disruptions caused by Japanese migrants within the context of evolving immigration reform. The Legion’s activism in exclusion contributes to an understanding of the history of states’ rights and federalism tropes in anti-immigrant arguments during the twentieth century.     

Slaveholders and revolution: the Jamaican planter class,British imperial politics,and the ending of the slave trade, 1775–1807

This article re-examines the declining influence of Jamaican sugar planters within the British Empire during the period between the outbreak of the American Revolution in 1775 and Parliament’s decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807. Much of the existing scholarship emphasises the consequences of the American Revolutionary War and rise of abolitionism during the 1780s as pivotal to the fall of the planters. This article argues that those challenges did not determine the fate of the Jamaican planters. Rather, it was the radicalisation of the French and Haitian Revolutions, and the extended period of war that began in 1793, that led to their eventual defeat over the question of the slave trade.     

Social work and the politics of ‘austerity’: Ireland and Italy

ABSTRACT

No detailed analyses have been undertaken comparing and contrasting how social work is responding to the problems generated by the imposition of so-called ‘austerity’ measures in Europe. Comprised of three sections, the discussion is focused on Ireland and Italy. This comparative exploration locates social work within encompassing frameworks related to the changing population, political economy and welfare regime in each of these jurisdictions. Aspects of contemporary social work within Ireland and Italy are charted and the possibilities for confronting neoliberal ‘austerity’ are analysed. The article seeks to prompt and encourage comparative reflection within Europe in relation to how the social work imagination can be imbued with a new radicalism in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.     

Poverty,exclusion and child protection practice: the contribution of ‘the politics of recognition&respect’

The affective dimensions of poverty, including the impact of wider policy discourses and services that ‘other’ and shame people in poverty, are increasingly recognized. In response, Lister [(2013). Power, not Pity: Poverty and Human Rights. Ethics and Social Welfare, 7(2), 109–123] advocates for ‘a politics of recognition&respect’ that centralizes the voices, participation and lived experiences of those who live in poverty. This paper considers how applying Lister’s theory could improve child protection (CP) social work in England, from a human rights and social justice perspective. The paper draws on findings from an ATD Fourth World participatory research project aimed at updating the course content for a pre-existing social worker training module on poverty awareness. The project brings together families with experience of poverty and CP interventions, social work practitioners and academics.     

The politics of death: on life after the “end of history”

In this paper, the most recent writings by Giorgio Agamben and Bruno Latour are brought into dialog by examining what light they shed on contemporary debates concerning “end of life” decisions. More specifically, the paper focuses on the debates sparked by Diane Pretty's request for a grant of immunity against legal prosecution if her husband were to assist her to commit suicide and so terminate her increasingly unbearable suffering from motor neurone disease. The aim of this exercise is to articulate the presuppositions informing two influential and radically opposed views on the contemporary reconfiguration of relationships between humans, animals and other non‐humans.     

Reporting disability in the age of austerity: the changing face of media representation of disability and disabled people in the United Kingdom and the creation of new ‘folk devils’

Following its election in 2010 the UK’s Coalition Government has sought to implement radical restructuring of disability-related benefits justified by reference to the financial crises of 2007/08. In this article we examine how these changes have impacted on coverage of disability in the UK media comparing and contrasting coverage of disability in newspapers in 2010/11 with a similar period in 2004/05. Our analysis suggests that disabled people have become a ‘folk devil’ and that there has been a significant change in the way that disability is reported. Newspaper coverage in 2010/11 was less sympathetic and there was an increase in articles that focused on disability benefit and fraud, and an increase in the use of pejorative language to describe disabled people. An audience reception study suggests that this coverage is having an impact on the way that people think about disabled people.     

“The ANC brand is bulletproof”: accountability and the logic of the brand in South African politics

In this paper, I draw on analyses of the brand in the commercial world to explore the implications of branding when applied to political parties and politicians. Specifically, I examine the ramifications of the logic of the brand for accountability within a multi-party democracy. I argue that in branding discourse, the brand serves as a risk-management strategy by creating relations of loyalty with consumers, designed to secure forgiveness for possible transgressions on the part of the brand and thus protect brand equity. Through an analysis of how branding discourse is applied to South African politics by journalists, political parties and participants in social media, I show how in this arena, branding logic works to defer accountability for political parties and politicians who fail to deliver on election promises. Culpability becomes assessed in terms of damage to brand.     

Openings,absences and omissions: Aspects of the treatment of ‘race’, culture and ethnicity in British cultural studies

Abstract

British cultural studies has, in an innovative and exciting way over the last three or four decades, opened up spaces for the serious analysis of many aspects of culture, including those inextricably related to questions of ‘race’, ethnicity and subordinated groups in urban environments in Britain. However, there have been a number of weaknesses and omissions with regard to Britain's black, Caribbean-descended population. Some of these are possibly the result of earlier, unresolved theoretical and methodological disputes within the field of cultural studies; others stem, perhaps, from an over-reliance on approaches arising out of youth subcultural analytical frameworks. Consequently, less than the required attention has been paid to the active cultures of achievement developed by the adult, black working-class population of Caribbean descent in Britain from the 1950s to the 1990s.     

‘Khalas! Literature is the resistance against politics,and this is the politics of literature’: an interview with Atiq Rahimi

ABSTRACT

Atiq Rahimi is a director, photographer and translingual author who has published in Dari (Persian) and in French since 1999. As an outspoken author, Rahimi did not refrain from narrating loss, trauma and fundamentalism already in the 1990s. For his first publication in French, Syngué Sabour. Pierre de patience, he was awarded the highest literary price in France, the Prix Goncourt. With his recently published novel Les Porteurs d’eau, set in Afghanistan and Europe, Rahimi also explores challenges of the global Afghanistani diaspora. Inspired by his personal experiences of travelling from Kabul to Paris, Rahimi explores, with his Kafkaesque narratives, themes of loss, suffering and survival, all located in a war-torn country. In this interview, conducted in Paris, conversing in Persian and French, Rahimi talks about his personal journey and discusses cultural as well as literary theories. He mentions literature without borders, considers the power of literature as a means of taking a stand against political reality, learning French as a teenager and depicting strong female characters. Additionally, Rahimi explains to what extent Persian linguistics allowed him to depict the absurdity of living exile in his latest novel and ends the interview explaining the rationale behind the idea of authors without borders.     

In Whose Service? Technology,Care and Disabled People: The case for a disability politics perspective

This paper discusses the introduction of telematics technologies, which are advancing rapidly in Britain and throughout the world, and which impact increasingly on the lives of disabled people. The authors argue that, to date, technology-based services have been largely, if not exclusively, determined by the interests of care service professionals, technologists and the commercial sector. Missing from the debate has been the perspective of the disability movement, which challenges professional hegemony, and introduces important issues such as choice, control and access to the wider environment. Such a perspective is needed if technological advances are to empower disabled people and not simply provide administrative solutions to the problems of increasingly hard-pressed service providers.     

‘Brilliant,bright, boiling words’: literary disability,language and the writing body in the work of Christopher Nolan

This article uses theory on disability, embodiment and language to explore the production, context and presentation of two pieces of life-writing by Christopher Nolan. It examines Nolan’s unusual use of language and form in his presentations of an experience of disability, and considers its literary and political significance. Consideration is given to the role played within language, and by extension society, by the disabled writing body, as a point of resistance to dominant discourse, and as a point of origin both for language that subverts dominant, disabling language and for ‘new’ language that might replace it.     

‘We feel the responsibility that you shirk’: movement institutionalization,the politics of responsibility and the case of the Swedish environmental movement

This article provides directions for advancing the conceptualization of the relationship between social movements and institutionalization, based on a case study of the Swedish environmental movement strategies. We argue that the concepts of (de)responsibilization and (de)politicization provide tools for an improved analysis of the dynamics of how social movements interact both with established political institutions and corporations in a new context. The introduction of new regulatory frameworks in environmental politics has shaped interaction between social movements and the state in new ways, involving neoliberal responsibilization, meaning active involvement by civil society and business in political responsibilities previously associated with state agencies – a development involving an increasing emphasis on market mechanisms. We argue that this has involved a de-politicization of environmental issues in the sense that it engages political actors in a moral discourse and a technocratic practice that suppresses the (potential) articulation of social conflict through consensus building. However, we also show how movement actors resist the discourse that encourages them to take on certain responsibilities, thus engaging in a politics of responsibility. Empirically, we demonstrate how the changing strategies of the Swedish environmental movement in the 2000s need to be understood in relation to the following processes, indicating that the Swedish case has a general relevance for an understanding of the contemporary environmental movement globally: (1) the transformation of the Swedish model of welfare capitalism under the influence of neoliberal discourse; (2) international environmental policy developments, most importantly the emergence of climate change as a dominant issue globally.